Hello everyone,
Welcome to day number 22 of this year’s Advent Calendar. The final stretch. And since it’s Monday again, let’s get active one last time and do a little quiz, this time about
Word Order
Now, in prior calendars, I’ve often had a word order exercise where I would give you a group of single short sentences that you had to combine into one big one. Which is fun and a great practice but it’s super duper work intensive for me because it really works best if you all get individual feedback for each of your versions.
The general problem with word order exercises is that there usually isn’t THE ONE correct solution. Especially once a sentence a moderate length, there can be a DOZEN of correct versions, and the differences are often very fine and highly contextual.
That’s hard to capture in an exercise and sadly, AI is not reliable enough to navigate all these subtleties either.
But anyway… today, I want to try out a new type of exercise that is basically built around the fact that there’s more than one correct answer.
Here’s what we’ll do:
I’ll give you a sentence in English and then give you 4 translations in German. And your task is to “rank” them from most to least natural sounding.
You don’t have to focus on the English original too much. So don’t try to analyze what nuance I am trying to express with the phrasing. It’s just meant as fairly neutral without special emphasis and the German ones should be ranked that way too.
All you have to do is drag and drop them around and when you think you got it you check.
And then, you’ll see the solution along with a short explanation of how each version sounds so you have an idea why it is where it is.
It’s a short quiz, with 3 questions, but you’ll probably be puzzling a bit and I didn’t want to make it overwhelming. If you like the format, we can do longer ones next year.
So, if you’re ready, I’d say … viel Spaß
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So, how did you do?
I did try to make it so the options and orderings are fairly unambiguous but it’s well possible that I overlooked something. So if you feel like a sentence should or could be higher or lower in one of the sets, please let me know.
Oh and just to make sure… those were NOT all the possible options for these sentences. There are way more and also more fairly neutral sounding ones.
So if you have any questions about any of these or some alternative order, please let me know in the comments.
And of course if you have questions about my explanations, let me know as well. This is a huge topic and it’s hard to squeeze into short answers like in the quiz if you don’t have the background, but I can definitely clear it up or give you pointers to my lessons about this, so don’t be too shy to ask, even if you’re A1.
That’s it for today folks, I hope you enjoyed this one and maybe got some new insights. Have a great day and I’ll see you in the comments or tomorrow.
Bis dann :)
My order got increasingly better with each question so, I think I was learning from the explanations that you gave after each question as I went along. In the first two exercises I was best at recognizing the least most natural sounding sentence/s. In the last question I managed to place them all in the order you were looking for. Cool exercise.
Oh that’s a lot of progress for such a short exercise then. Well done!!
I was able to identify the most natural sounding version for each one, but the rest was a free for all :)
That’s the most important thing :)!
I was able to get core ordering but some of the ones I swapped number 1 and 2 or 2 and 3 where the explanations made it seem ok to not be 100% aligned.
Yeah, there are no sharp lines anyway, at least not for all examples. It’s more about getting a feeling than getting everyting 100% correct.
For the first two, I identified the most and least natural but not the other two. For the last question I identified the two most natural, but not the other two.
It’s clearly a work in progress but I feel like I’m getting there.
Well, I pretty much got the most natural sounding version in the correct position each time, and spotted the most unnatural one, but got the middle 2 wrong! Great idea though – thank you. Just shows flexible emphasis can be.
Whoa! Very thought-provoking. I also got everything wrong, but then word order is my nemesis.
Perhaps it might be more rewarding is each question was worth 4 points and we got a point for each one that we had in the correct position.
You’re probably right! I had it such that the top answer gives 4 points and the others then 3,2 and 1, but maybe that’s frustrating if you get the two bottom ones correct and you’re short 7 points for mixing up the top (which are both idiomatic). I’ll change that now.
I’d like that too!
It should actually be like that now, except 2 points instead of one.
I always got at least one of the top two wrong. I think it’s because my German might be a bit “veraltet.” In example 1, for instance, I would be hard pressed to hear anything coming before the time as natural. To me, putting “heute” at the end sounds very Americanized and is something I would correct on students’ papers. For the second one, why is it more correct to put “mir” closer to the verb than “Maria,” who is the subject? For the last one…well, drat, now I can’t remember the details of the last one.
At least for the first question, the top two are definitely very similar, so there’s not much tension at all.
That’s the difficulty with this type of exercise. Your order was arguably okay as well.
For the second one:
There’s this “rule” in word order that says “pronouns before nouns”. You can look at it through this lens.
But I prefer to look at it holistically. The left side of the sentence is the scene setup where established things are placed. “mir” is a pronoun referring to the speaker and context suggests that the speaker is already part of this story. So the “mir” is just a quick callback that needs to be there for grammar more than for message. Maria is a name, so that has a higher “news value” or “info-load” than “mir”. Yes, she’s the subject and subject tends to come very early in the setup-phase, but since it’s a more defined element (Name) the pronoun has a stronger pull to the left.
If you replace “Maria” with the pronoun “sie”, it switches. Now “sie” has the stronger pull letf because it’s a super bland Nominative, while “mir” has at least a “Dative” as extra information.
Does that help?
Thanks…that was an interesting quiz and I thought very helpful. Thanks for going to the trouble to write it. I also want to tell you how much I have enjoed looking at the animals who have been in your pictures as you announce each day. Frohe Weihnachten und einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr t you and all your course members.
Danke, dir auch frohe Weihnachten und guten Rutsch!!
Hallo,
A couple typos:
“once a sentence a moderate lengths” (once a sentence reaches a moderate length)
Q1: “Ich gehen” – our friend axlroth has already pointed it ;)
As for the quiz, I… drumroll…
Aced it! :)))))
Bis morgen!
Got them almost all right! You threw me off with “Ich gehen” — I thought I was supposed to put it last because of the misconjugation.
Argh, I saw that and thought I’d fixed it, but apperantly not. Sorry for that!
Keine Sorge! :)